I’ve spent more than two decades inside player development.
In that time, I’ve been called everything you can imagine:

• “You’re holding my child back.”
• “You’re not qualified.”
• “You’re jealous.”
• “You’re arrogant.”
• And plenty more.

But I don’t blame parents.

Most of them love their children deeply.
Most want to help.
And most are trying to make sense of a sport that often feels like a maze with no map.

The real problem?
They’re being fed messages — from the system, from coaches, from rankings, from academies — that create fear, urgency, and pressure long before a child can even understand what performance tennis is.

And over the years, I’ve seen the consequences up close.

When Love Turns Into Pressure

I’ve seen a parent remortgage their house to chase a dream for their child.
It didn’t end well.

I’ve warned a parent they were damaging their relationship with their child.
That story ended up in the national press.

I’ve watched parents shout at kids on court.
I’ve seen 11-year-olds treated like full-time athletes.
I’ve seen families pour money and hours into a dream that never belonged to the child.

And I’ve watched what happens next:

• burnout
• withdrawal
• anxiety
• loss of identity
• quitting the sport entirely

This isn’t anecdotal — it’s well-documented.

Studies across youth sport show that parental pressure is directly associated with burnout, reduced enjoyment, and dropout (Crane & Temple, 2015; Gustafsson et al., 2017).
Children don’t quit because they stop loving the sport — they quit because the experience stops feeling like theirs.

The Power Parents Believe They Have…..and the Power They Don’t

I’ve been abused, threatened, and told my coaching career would be over — often by parents of players outside the top 300 nationally.
Not because their child was being mistreated.
But because expectations didn’t match reality.

And part of that is the environment they’re in.

Youth sport today markets opportunity as scarcity:

• “Commit early or fall behind.”
• “If you don’t specialise now, it’s too late.”
• “If you don’t do private lessons, others will overtake you.”

These beliefs persist even though research consistently shows early specialisation increases injury risk, reduces long-term performance, and accelerates burnout (Jayanthi et al., 2015; Myer et al., 2016).

The reality?

Children who sample multiple sports
and enter performance pathways later
outperform early specialists in the long run
(Côté et al., 2009; Barth et al., 2020).

Yet tennis still pushes the myth of “early or never.”

Dream Sellers and the High-Performance Illusion

I’ve turned down thousands of pounds because I didn’t agree with what parents wanted.
But many coaches won’t — and I don’t entirely blame them.

When the system tells parents:

• their seven-year-old is “talented,”
• under-9 rankings matter,
• academies can “make” a player,
• high-performance pathways start before primary school,

…coaches quickly learn what parents want to hear.

And when the market rewards:

• early success,
• the appearance of expertise,
• trophy photos with young players,
• and inflated claims of having “made” players,

…coaches feel pressured to play along.

This isn’t a moral issue.
It’s a systemic one.

Research by Bailey & Collins (2013) shows that systems built on early identification create a destructive cycle of pressure, false certainty, and talent myths.
And parents get swept into it before they even realise what’s happening.

We Need to Stop Blaming Parents, and Start Questioning the System

Parents react the way the environment teaches them to react.
When you create:

• leaderboards for under-9s
• “elite” academies for seven-year-olds
• talent labels before biological maturity
• funding structures that reward early performance
• coach education that still pushes outdated models

…you create fear.
Fear creates urgency.
Urgency creates pressure.
Pressure creates poor behaviour.

This isn’t a story about bad parents or bad coaches.
It’s a story about a system built on fragile assumptions, outdated learning models, and survivorship bias.

Because when the sport celebrates the 0.01% who made it,
and ignores the thousands who burned out or quit,
we completely misrepresent how development actually works.

If We Want to Protect Kids, We Need to Protect the Environment Around Them

The solution isn’t:

• more rules
• more lectures for parents
• more punishment for coaches

The solution is building environments that:

• prioritise play and enjoyment
• emphasise long-term development over early results
• educate parents with evidence, not fear
• remove meaningless rankings in childhood
• stop selling “performance pathways” to primary school kids
• support coaches to teach, not appease
• value psychological safety as much as physical skill

Sport science is clear:

Children thrive in environments that promote autonomy, exploration, variability, and intrinsic motivation
(Ryan & Deci, 2000; Davids et al., 2008).

And they suffer in environments built on fear, pressure, and unrealistic timelines.

Final Thought: The Problem Sits Above All of Us

After 25 years, I don’t feel anger toward parents.
I feel empathy.

They’re doing what the system has taught them to do.
And until tennis stops selling early talent, early pressure, and early dreams,
we will keep losing kids who could have — and should have — loved this sport for life.

To protect the players,
we need to fix the messages they’re receiving.
Not just from parents.
Not just from coaches.
But from the entire tennis ecosystem.

Because the problem isn’t at the bottom.
It’s at the top.

References

Bailey, R., & Collins, D. (2013). The standard model of talent development and its discontents. Kinesiology Review, 2(4), 248–259.

Barth, M., Güllich, A., & Emrich, E. (2020). The path to international medals: A supervised machine learning approach to explore the role of age of onset, practice volume, and coaching. Journal of Expertise, 3(3), 157–169.

Côté, J., Baker, J., & Abernethy, B. (2009). From play to practice: A developmental framework for the acquisition of expertise in team sports. In Cognitive and motivational processes in sports (pp. 89–114). Routledge.

Crane, J., & Temple, V. (2015). A systematic review of dropout from organized sport among children and youth. European Physical Education Review, 21(1), 114–131.

Davids, K., Button, C., & Bennett, S. (2008). Dynamics of skill acquisition: A constraints-led approach. Human Kinetics.

Gustafsson, H., Sagar, S. S., & Stenling, A. (2017). Fear of failure, psychological stress, and burnout among adolescent athletes. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 28, 101–107.

Jayanthi, N., Pinkham, C., Dugas, L., Patrick, B., & LaBella, C. (2015). Sports specialization in young athletes: Evidence-based recommendations. Sports Health, 5(3), 251–257.

Myer, G. D., Jayanthi, N., Difiori, J. P., et al. (2016). Sport specialization, part II: Alternative solutions to early sport specialization. Sports Health, 8(1), 65–73.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation: Classic definitions and new directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25(1), 54–67.